thread: 2005-06-16 : The Forge and Me
On 2005-06-21, Ninja Hunter J wrote:
I see something like this:Imagine to unified blogging system like Lj or Blogger, where the entire community is explicitly about RPG design.
You have people whose opinions you respect. They write articles, post diagrams, and so forth. Other people can comment.
There are also people who write articles you don't care about. If they don't algorithmically line up with what you care about, aren't your friend, and don't make the Headlines (see below) then you won't see their articles.
There's a headline page. What goes on that headline page is two things: What's New and Editor's Choice. The Editors, of course, are multiple (if not many) and direct the publication.
This is what I see:
1: There's some sort of peer review (Editor's Choice) of articles that are along the lines of what people are trying to make. Clinton, Vincent, and anyone else who can write this stuff, you're writing the code, you're setting up the theory, make sure those peers are the right people.
2: It takes effort to write an article that it doesn't take to write "YUO AER TEH STUPOD I MA TEH SIMMULATONAST ADN YUO AER TEH SUCK GAMEIST". Don't build in spellcheck, but have spellcheck be a marker of stupid posts. Seriously, it's amazing how ill-spelled posts correllate with "I don't know what I'm talking about".
3: Threaded comments on articles are probably a good idea so you can weed through for the part you're interested in; linearity is only so scalable. After all, the comment threads on blogs are where I get a lot of ideas, and if I write an article that others comment on, I'm gonna want to know what they're talking about.
4: Have a built-in facility for "me too"ing. When someone says something smart, other people will make posts that say "This guy said something smart! [link]". If, instead, that's not listed as an article, but boosts the article up toward the top of What's New, it'll be a flag for people, Editors included, to read it and maybe make it a headline article.
5: Have an extensive list of questions about what games you like and don't like, services you can offer the community, your company label if you've got one, and your real name (hideable, of course, viewable only to "friends" or whatever). Don't publish someone's articles until they've filled them out. Use the data for an Amazon-like "If you like x, statistically, you're probably interested in y" thing. Also, if you can, pull a Political Compass thing, where you're asked a bunch of questions about what you would do in a given situation. That'll line you up with like-minded individuals, irrespective of GNS (or other) identity politics.
6: Build in facilities for a library, like the Forge does, where particularly good posts get put for future reading. They could be put there by GM - er, editorial fiat, or voting, or whatever. The important thing is that there be an evolving library of canon.
7: Instead of merely responding to a post, you can click "write response article". That gives a certain provenance to articles so you can see how ideas evolved. Whenever you write an article, you can type a URL for the inspiration for the article if it's out of the system.
8: Every article has the same graphic identity, unlike other blog systems. We're all writing for a magazine, not writing our own magazines. That's brand identity, and it's a powerful thing.
9: Sell advertizing if we must, but keep a tight rein on how it looks and what it sells, like Penny Arcade does
Something like that.
I see this as potentially solving the following problems:
- Disallowing those whose ideas are unpopular, ill-formed, or stupid is a good way to validate those calling "Elitist!" This way, they've got a place to write like idiots, and maybe they'll form a good idea eventually. When assembling metadata about a user, don't look further than the last 5 posts or something; if they've stopped misspelling, typing in all caps, and their readership is increasing, they shouldn't be penalized for the dumb crap they wrote last month.
- Leaving out editorial moderation leads to noise. Putting something on the front page of a newspaper is an editorial decision, and an important one.
- Looking like amateurs does none of us any good. This gives graphical cachet to those of us who don't have it.
I've got server space, but don't know crap about coding. The server's soon moving to another high-bandwidth locale and getting some newer, snazzier processors. If no one else wants to run the thing, I could, but someone else is gonna have to be responsible for the code.
Whoa, long post.
